Giving Children the Gift of Sight – ORBIS International

Giving Children the Gift of Sight – ORBIS International

By: Flavia Kajoba

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On Saturday May 15th 2010, I attended the ORBIS Pull for Sight fundraising event at Vancouver International Airport. At the event I saw men and women from various backgrounds and organizations come together in support of ORBIS International and the work they are doing to help eliminate preventable blindness in the developing world.

One of my friends, Simmi Purewal, a third-year university student at UBC, was on-site volunteering for the event. Here is what she had to say about ORBIS International:

“ORBIS is an excellent non-profit organization that tackles the essential problem of eye care in countries that have no vital means of providing a cure for the problem or to the people who have no means of affording it.

The organization is inspirational in the sense that they are providing people with the gift of sight. They have a plane that is set up as a hospital and many trained professionals who are trained and dedicated to providing sight to those who are most in need of it. Not only do their trained doctors and nurses provide help; but the organization also allows the society to help them with their task. By donating your old glasses, their professionals adjust them and give them to someone’s eyes that are similar. Therefore, it’s an organization that gives the gift of sight to those in need with the help of society.”

In addition to the operation of the world’s only Flying Eye Hospital, ORBIS International strives to prevent and treat avoidable blindness through capacity building in the form of: “clinical training, technical assistance, institutional development, community education, behavioral change, and health care reform.” – ORBIS International

Currently, ORBIS International has long-term capacity building projects taking place in Bangladesh, China, Ethiopia, India, Vietnam, Peru and Jamaica. Additional projects are underway in many other countries around the globe.

For more information on ORBIS International and how to get involved, check out their international website, blog, Facebook and Twitter fan pages.

For Canadian specific volunteer opportunities and more information on what ORBIS Canada is doing to help the developing world, visit their Canadian website, Facebook and Twitter fan pages.

Together we can transform the lives of the blind and the visually impaired in the developing world, and help give children the gift of sight!